Robert Miller: Court decision moves state toward cleaner air

Updated 11:44 pm, Friday, May 2, 2014

The air on sultry summer days in Connecticut can be thick with smog. On those days, health officials tell people with heart and lung problems to stay indoors, lest the pollution aggravate their conditions.

"That being said, the models show that 98 percent of air pollution in Fairfield County is from (upwind) states."

That is why Gobin and others in Connecticut were cheering this week after hearing news from the U.S. Supreme Court. The court ruled 6-2 that the federal Environmental Protection Agency had the power to regulate the smog from big, coal-burning power plants in the Midwest.

"People have known about this for a while," he said of the dangers from air pollution.

Research in recent years has found the health problems caused by air pollution can be permanent, and that children are particularly susceptible, he said.

"They're younger. Their lungs are still forming," Dworkin said. "They spend their days outside. They run around and exercise a lot. And children tend to be mouth-breathers. People who breath through their noses can filter out a lot of that pollution."

The court decision had been a long time coming.

Over the years, Connecticut had been party to several lawsuits to get Midwest states to cut the amount of pollution they released. Those states resisted.

The fight had moved from one legal front to another when, in 2011, the EPA completed its work on regulating coal plant pollution under its Cross State Air Pollution Rule. Then the U.S. Court of Appeals in Washington, D.C., overturned the rule in 2012.

Gobin said the appeals court decision -- which said the EPA had not properly followed the federal Clean Air Act in writing the regulations -- would have completely tied the EPA's hands.

"It would have made it impossible for the EPA to do what it wanted to do," she said. But now the new Supreme Court decision means the EPA has the discretion to regulate this pollution.

In some ways, the energy markets and the availability of cheap, cleaner-burning natural gas mean one of the worst elements of air pollution -- sulphur dioxide -- is less an issue than it used to be, Gobin said.

But nitrogen oxide -- the main contributor to smog -- remains a problem.

"There's also arsenic and mercury," Dworkin said.

Gobin said the EPA, which dropped the allowable levels of nitrogen oxide in the air from 84 parts per billion to 75 parts per billion, will probably move that level even lower in the years to come.

"Science is showing a safer level might be in the 60 to 70 parts-per-billion range," she said.

The EPA also has to decide whether to institute regulations to reach those limits. It could be through standards set for individual power plants, or it could be through a cap-and-trade system in which plants that don't meet the EPA standards buy air pollution credits from those that do.

"This will not happen quickly," Gobin said.

"It doesn't mean clean air for Connecticut," she said of the Supreme Court ruling. "But it allows us to move in the right direction."